Re: [GNUnet-developers] End-user wishlist

[Igor Wronsky]

On Wed, 25 Jun 2003, Christian Grothoff wrote:

> > I looked through my
> > preferences in mozilla and I'm fairly certain there wasn't anything
> > looking like that. If its not in the preferences its too complicated
> > for average user to set for certain, and even more sure is that
> > some install script can't set it automagically for arbitrary browser.
> > On the other hand, almost any browser supports setting mime helper
> > applications easily.
> I don't know enough about any of the plugin APIs to answer that; nevertheless,
> (ab)using mime-types just feels like the wrong answer, especially since the
> content will have a mime-type in addition to the URI. The URI is in some
> sense just the transport - how to get it. The mime-type is for the contents,
> not the transport.

See my other message for the purpose of my suggestion.

The point here is that we can make a scheme (like link listing
in ordinary web) successful by adapting to the imperfect world.
Or we can also try to be highly aesthetical and correct and
attempt to mold the world to the way we'd prefer it to be in
sterile standardization dreams.

If you can pull it off by being nice, and in reasonable time
frame, good. I know how I could pull the mime-trick in a jiffy
and so that it would work virtually everywhere. And remember:
I'm not referring to cannibalizing location of every resource
this way - "heck, I don't much care for anything else than AFS" -
I just feel it would be a reasonable compromise for distributing
AFS file entry points through the ordinary web. And the
'actual' mime type being different is only of slight annoyance,
which depends on how you use the system. If its about browsing
tiny files, yes, that'd be bad. If its for serious business of
transferring *large* files (thats what filesharing is probably
statistically mostly about), well, not many would like to see
them in their browser anyway, but stored to disk for later use.

By anonymity a lot of practicality is already wasted. Do we
have to be nonconformist and seek complications in everything
else as well? :)

But your uri scheme will of course do. Linux users will just
have to copy-paste the uris to a gnunet helper application.
A bit lame, though, but its hard to evaluate its psychological
consequences for application popularity. Well, probably none,
if it works more nicely on Windows as was claimed on the list.

Ok, enough raving for now. ;)



Igor